The devil comes in many guises. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the devil arrives by train on the small suburban town of Santa Rosa, California in the form of Joseph Cotton (The Third Man). Cotton portrays Uncle Charlie, a man with a mysterious past, who arrives in the small Southern Californian town to stay with his estranged relatives and hide from two pursuing detectives; a secret he keeps to himself.
Hitchcock’s films are a mélange of several elements from different genres: Vertigo (romantic paranormal murder mystery), Psycho (film-noir horror). But Shadow of a Doubt is a straight noir. Sure enough, there is a romantic subplot involving Young Charlie and one of the detectives, but on the whole the movie fills many of the film-noir tropes. Hitchcock uses the visual hallmarks such as the German expressionism, highlighted when Uncle Charlie is standing on the top of the stairs with the distorted shadow of a window in the background. Uncle Charlie is of course a man with a foggy past that is slowly revealed over the course of the film. For all the film-noir tropes, the film is distinctly Hitchcockian and was the master’s favorite of all his films.
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